I've been in the IT industry since the time of the dinosaurs (ICL anyone?). I've written books about the Internet and networking, consulted for all sorts of companies, and been a contributor and columnist for Network World for 18 years (check out my Backspin and Gearhead columns). I created and co-founded Netratings (now wholly owned by Nielsen) and have CTO'ed for a couple of startups. I live in Ventura, CA. I do not surf.

Apple's "Mountain Lion" Disappoints

On July 26, I installed “Mountain Lion“, Apple‘s latest version of its operating system, OS X. Today, three days later, I am not a happy customer.

Now I know that every major release of any software and particularly of any operating system is bound to have problems. There will always be odd bugs that annoy and frustrate but Apple has a problem: They are supposed to be better than everyone else. Why? Because Apple claims the high ground on design and execution and, in the main they have delivered and, some might argue, over-delivered. Apple has driven the entire PC market in ways that no other vendor has ever managed to do and much of that success has been due to delivering high quality.

So should we cut Apple a little slack? I don’t think so …

Enough scene-setting … why am I not happy? Well, I installed Mountain Lion – which was painless – on my iMac and the first odd things I noticed when it restarted was the screen brightness was at maximum and the Calendar app had been launched. I turned the brightness down, quit Calendar, and launched Chrome only to find that it had lost all of the “pinned” tabs. I reconfigured Chrome and left the room for a cup of tea. When I got back, the screen was back at full brightness, Calendar was running again, and a dialog box was open telling me that the wretched OS had crashed.

In the 72 hours since I installed Mountain Lion the OS has crashed at least half a dozen times. Chrome will not retain its pinned tabs. The brightness setting doesn’t stick after a crash. Calendar always runs at startup.

Yeah, so far (I’ve not had time to try all of the apps I use so other problems may await me) these are all small issues but come on, this is Mountain Lion installed on an iMac built in mid-2010, not some old clunky Mac from the naughties.

I’m hoping for some quick updates from Apple here …

I can’t be the only one with OS X problems … What issues have you seen with Mountain Lion and are you unhappy?

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Obviously there is something very wrong with your installation of Mountain Lion. I have been using the developer previews and the release version since April and have experienced 1…count them…one Mac OS kernel panic (system crash).

Now, if apps are crashing for you, that’s something else and likely not Mountain Lion’s fault. Is the entire Mac crashing to the point that you have to restart?

As for your brightness issues, go to Displays in System Preferences and uncheck “Automatically adjust brightness”.

Yep, according to the log the machine restarts after every 6 or 7 panics. And under Displays on my system there is no “Automatically adjust …” (really!). Curiously the brightness problem has disappeared in the last 48 hours of crashes. FWIW, the last SDR from this morning follows. A couple of people have looked at it but no joy so far. The panic type is either 14 (page fault) as below or 13 (general protection). Let me know at if you come to any conclusion …

Begin with attention to KEXTs for things that are outdated. If VirtualBox is 4.0.12, that’s seriously outdated; https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10267 notes that 4.1.16 was the first to be made compatible with a seeded build of Mountain Lion.

I went to the ‘genius’ bar with this same problem, and Apple pointed the finger straight at Chrome. When I took issue with the fact that Apple’s newest OS doesn’t work with Google Chrome the most popular browser on the planet, the ‘genius’ tried to explain to me why I shouldn’t be using Chrome… completely ignoring the idea that as a developer I want to work with all browsers to ensure I’m covering the largest audience… guess that isn’t possible with a new Mac. Color me disappointed.

I installed Mountain Lion on this 2000 MacBook Pro 17″ on the date of release and haven’t had any problems at all. I installed it on my wife’s MacBook Pro 15″ the following day and that computer hasn’t exhibited any issues either. Your article does detail how you prepared for the installation, there were several “get ready” for Mountain Lion articles on-line from Macworld and other sites. Did you follow any of them, such as preinstall updates, browser extensions, etc.?

As an owner of a 2009 iMac with Intel Core i5 2.66 GHz I can state that I have experienced NO SUCH ISSUES whatsoever. I of course can’t/won’t deny you and some users may be experiencing issues, but given the fact the the vast majority of user feedback is overwhelmingly positive, I can only suspect that the issue lies within software on your particular device and is not endemic to the operating system at all. Happily, for me and most all others the new operating system represents a great and innovative tweak to the lion OS 10. Safari has not crashed once and performs significantly faster than the previous version.

I’d say before posting on forbes site it makes sense to do troubleshooting first? Doesn’t really make sense to publish to the world that you ran into a few issues with the installation, with possible preinstallation issues you had on your machine to start with?

I had no big issues with the installations and I’ve done 3 already on 3 different machines (mac mini, imac and macbook air). One of them on the mac mini hung (negative time pending showed), I searched on google and found that it happened to others and they just waited and it was ok. I chose to reboot and it redid the installation, all completed ok within 35 minutes or so.

So there’s enough information out there to deal with oddities, I don’t think it’s prudent to post opinions about disapointments until you’ve done the right and basic steps. Apple is not GOD, they can’t possibly predict every possible scenario of what you’ve done with your machine outside of their standard and considering the quality they already delivered and numerous hours and days it saved me over and over on not having to spend the time on massive troubleshooting that I used to do in the PC world (windows), I’d say Apple delivers quite well on their commitment.

It’s funny cause I just browsed to forbes.com knowing or having this perception that forbes is the world’s authority on success and the tested and true solutions as I hear of “forbes top 10″ or Forbes top 100 richest people, etc, thinking they do research, and to come across this post didn’t make sense to me. I just expected a higher caliber of a review from anyone that posts artiles/blogs on forbes.

I agree with Dmitri, posting an article such as this could very well lower there stock since this is a reportable link to the top fortune 500. I would think carefully and logically before using your posting powers that be.

We will have to check the reports to see if you are an outlier or not. Running perfectly on my iMac and wife’s Air so far. We could hardly believe how simple and smooth the upgrade process was. We’ve been Windows folks for years so whenever something goes so smoothly we are always still amazed.

I have a late-2010 MacBook Air. I installed and have seen no issues, but you are correct that the brightness was turned all the way up. I wasn’t sure whether that’s how I had it before and only noticed when I read your article, so I pressed the F1 key a few times to tone it down, then rebooted to see whether my change stuck. It did.

I’m three for three on updating Macs in our household. It’s been a very pleasant experience. All three machines run smoother and faster than before (particularly Safari). In the past I’ve had installation problems, which were generally due to lingering disk issues (fixed with Disk Utility) or junk carried over from years of updating.

Ok, so you have a day 0 startup fest. One part is that you don’t know how to manage your startups. Is that Apple’s problem? The other part is that a Google product won’t work right. Are you sure that’s Apple’s problem.

Extend your Day 0 pains two years and you’ll have Windows.

If you need any help with running the simplest computer system in the world, I’ve got news for you… it’s not quite as simple as writing inflammatory blogs, but it doesn’t take any brains, either. You can figure one out, and I’m betting, you’ll eventually get the other one solved.

I installed Mountain Lion onto my iMac desktop- and it’s a 4 year old iMac- and honestly had no problems at all. My only disappointment was expecting a message center like I have on the iPhone and iAd but it seems to be an AIM app and I don’t AIM, unless I’m doing it wrong. But it did not alter my screen brightness, I haven’t had iCal pop up, and all my passwords, bookmarks, etc., were safe and sound.

I have upgraded to Mountain Lion on my 4 macbook airs, my Mac mini, and my iMac. Each one accepted the upgrade without a single problem. They are all running much faster, especially when surfing the web with Safari. Perhaps your problem is with Chrome, not Mountain Lion. I know there was a problem running Chrome on my new air, when I purchased it in June.

“The wretched OS”? Seriously? One person with problems on one machine does not make the OS “wretched.”

I have Mountain Lion running on a Mac Pro 2.8ghz, 8-core with 16GB of RAM and a striped RAID array consisting of 4 1TB drives. I upgraded my girlfriend’s current generation of Mac Mini. There have been no issues that I can remember on either machine, save for a handful of apps that need updates to work with Mountain Lion.

Calendar does not launch for no reason on other people’s machines. Brightness settings are not changing for large numbers of users. Surely you are not blaming Mountain Lion because Chrome’s developers failed to assure that your pinned tabs stick. Are you?

As to crashes, others are not reporting them in widespread numbers. Perhaps you need to consider that maybe your hardware had a flaw that Mountain Lion exposed. I know that there were releases of Windows that would start crashing computers that had been operating fine. Turned out that there were RAM problems in those machines and that the OS programming of the chipset exposed them. Have you checked the SMART statistics on your drive to assure that it’s healthy? Did you boot on a CD/DVD/USB and check for corruption on your boot drive?

It sounds to me like you need to take your Mac into an Apple store and sit down with them while they diagnose the problem. If they can’t resolve the issues, *then* post a scathing editorial.

Absolute breeze installing Mountain Lion on all my macs, even my older macs. In fact, Mountain Lion works absolutely seamlessly on all of my macs. I’t is by far and away THE most superb OS apple has released for Mac. Not only does Mountain Lion one flawlessly on my newer Macs, it also runs flawlessly on my five-year-old MacBook Pro with a core 2 duo processor (it actually made this computer faster). I suggest you troubleshoot a bit to find out what your issue is before writing a post like this.

It seems like you are trying to drive down Apple’s stock price with inflammatory, purposely misleading titles crafted to make it look like there is widespread dissatisfaction, leveraging Forbes good name in the financial sector.

Although it took longer to download than I thought it would, everything has worked perfectly and I am very pleased with the new OS so far. I wouldn’t put Chrome on a Mac either though. Wretched? Sorry you had trouble, but it seems you’re the exception and not the rule….

That’s the internet for ya. Bloggers are always allowed to air their grievances outside of forums that cover this sort of stuff. Well, it’s just one person’s opinion and shouldn’t do Mountain Lion any harm since most reviews have been positive. Not every installation will run perfectly for every machine. I’ve heard about installation problems related to aftermarket memory and such which doesn’t necessarily make it a software problem. Whatever. I know there’s no way that most ML installations will constantly cause OS crashes. Apple would never get to where it is today if that was happening. I’m not sure how many Macs are represented in 3.2% ML download rate but it’s probably a pretty large number. Better just take this article with a grain of salt and head on over to some Apple ML installation forums for troubleshooting and such.

I have installed it on my old office iMac, my new home iMac, my new MacAir and my old Powerbook. All without a hitch. No problems on any machine. They are talking to each other. I couldn’t have had a better experience.

Well, that’s funny since I’ve got 3 Mac’s and none of them have crashed since I installed 10.8. So, I think it really isn’t 10.8 more like something with your Mac or a 3rd party software issue or a hardware issue, one of two most likely the case.

You need to run the disk utility to see if your hard disk has any errors. I had a similar problem upon install in a 2008 macbook pro. After install, which said “successful”, the dock stopped working and my computer crashed after 2-3 minutes. I ran the disk utility and it said the hard disk was corrupted. I then rebooted using Command-R and ran the repair disk feature. It was able to repair the disk and I have had no problems since. Hope this helps you.

I’m having some problems with the notes and iPhoto app. They keep crashing. Also had a major issue with notification centre not working, which was fixed after a 2 hour phone call to Apple care where i needed to ‘repair disk permissions’.

Installed on MacBook pro (mid-2010) on day 1. No problems. Mac runs smoother now than it did with Lion. Can’t comment on Chrome as I don’t use it. Didn’t have the iCal or brightness issues. We can change brightness and startup settings quite easily in system preferences. Surprised that this was even published on Forbes as an article… Seems like it should have been posted as a request for help on a tech support forum.

If you are stupid enough to use Chrome, you deserve to run into problems. Chrome is numerous bugs that makes it incompatible with Mountain Lion. Some of these have or are in the process of being fix, others will have to wait. These are well documented. Go cry to Google.

It sounds like you are in the middle of a bad dream. But I installed Mountain Lion on my MacBook Air and my wife’s 13″ MacBook Pro on Friday with no problems. The install was quick and painless. I did not have any of the issues you have mentioned. In fact, I have had zero issues since install.

I am sure it sucks to have a corrupted load, but I think it is a little overkill to trash the OS entirely. Maybe you had disk errors before your install. Maybe you had some other existing problem that was brought to the forefront during the upgrade. There are a lot of things that can cause these types of issues. Not necessarily the OS itself (as evidenced by the many, many seamless installs).

Waaah! Waaah! Dear God, this article comes across just like a baby whining. You have an individual problem with your installation. With your tech background, you KNOW that is possible and a reinstall might resolve it. You fail to contact Apple tech support or visit the genius bar, let alone confirm others are having similar problems. Even if they are, these are bugs and not disappointments. This article is full of fail and you have lost all credibility with me.

The iMac install and subsequent testing went so smooth, that I also installed Mountain Lion on my Mid-2011 MBA…again, no problems.

Extremely happy with the OS so far…esp. iMessaging, and Notifications…love being able to quickly access those…

Not trying to insult your intelligence, but did you update all of your installed software to include Lion? In addition, did you run disk utility to correct any problems such as permissions? it’s a good idea to do at least these steps before attempting an OS upgrade…

Apple’s Mountain Lion Disappoints? Not to me, not to a lot of people, actually, the majority of people. However, it does disappoint me to see an article at Forbes that has no base on statistics and yet does a general claim.

Honestly, learn a bit or two about computers, gather some statistics of what people’s experiences are THEN make a general statement.

I’m using the OS, my wife is also using it, we had no issues during the installation, overall feeling is that the UI is faster, all the new features are yet to show a single bug, and we couldn’t be happier with it.

I am having multiple issues with Mountain Lion as well especially with Safari and lock ups with other apps. I have a mid 2011 Macbook air. I found this thread because I was googling for other users having similar problems. So it just confirms what I have been experiencing.

I tried mirroring through my apple TV and it shows a lot of lag and any running script/movie/video hangs up after a while.I also saw the apps getting crashed too many time and in general the OSX is slower than before.

I was most expecting the launch for the mirroring capabilities but it is very disappointing.

Your byline says you cover tech news. You should know better than to blame your computer problems on Apple. When was the last time you did basic maintenance on your iMac? Did you even bother to prepare your system for the upgrade? Millions of upgrades go perfectly smoothly, and sometimes there are problems. Your problem hardly merits a blaring headline on Forbes.com. Get a grip. You have a full backup of your old system, right? Right?

You only need to do a basic google search to see there are a lot of issues with ML. I am a huge apple fan but I am just a little disappointed with the wifi issues I have had. By the way what do you mean by “preparing your system for an upgrade”? A simple back up seems to be the only action required.

Well, let’s look at a couple of other issues as well… IMMEDIATELY, after Mountain Lion installs, AND you TRY and start various, STANDARD, applications like mail, contacts or Safari, be REAL careful what happens…. Let’s start with ‘Contects’ (address book) … On my install TODAY, the initial setup thought my old pop mail account was in fact an iCloud account… UGLY. So, the way that Mountain Lion looks at ‘contacts’ as part of ‘mail’ and iCloud is a bit odd. Mountain Lion could not figure out who it was or what it was or where to go to find out when trying to ‘update’ my contacts database (217 entries) …. It just sits and churns in a loop FOREVER. Luckily, I was sitting at a Genius Bar, otherwise I would STILL be trying to figure this out. A ‘genius’ helped me by deleting some .plist files (he did it too fast for me to follow) but it was not fun.

THEN, because the initial setup process thought my old pop account was an iCloud account and allegedly messed up my ‘contacts’ database, when I started the Mountain Lion MAIL client, things got REAL strange… the new Mail just IGNORED almost all of the mail FOLDERS in my mail client from Snow Leopard… Just ignored them… I had to retrieve my latest Time Machine back-up and get my old email folders from that back-up. NOW, I have to IMPORT these into the new Mountain Lion mail client… This will take hours…

Mountain Lion works perfectly on all three of my Macs; Air, MBPro and iMac. The MBP and iMac shipped with Snow Leopard. Lion was Apple’s Vista. ML resolved all the problems for me. No crashes, no freezes, no issues. Of Course, I don’t use that Chrome abomination. Must be that or some other hack that’s causing your problems.

A MacBook Pro 15″ Late 2011 and a MacBook Air 13″ Mid 2011 both installed flawlessly with not problems whatsoever. I am still not sure if I like messages over ichat, but that’s not a bug, just implementation.

Since the Mountain Lion update I seem to have some problems connecting my brand new iMac (27′ 8gb) with other devices. Some usb connections won’t be made the first time I plug the devices in, as well as it cannot connect with my wireless wifi printer (Canon MG6250, also brand new). Tried to install Mountain Lion a second time, same problems. Anyone got some suggestions on how I can solve this?

“usb connections”? If you’re talking about USB hard drives, there are older chipsets that aren’t compatible with the newer OSX releases. Same holds true for Firewire devices. Enclosures are cheap; get a quality unit from Macsales.com.

After a couple of days no (negative) impact on my workflow — consistent with the vast majority of the feedback from others who have upgraded.

One has to wonder then at the motivation for this post. Is it simply that the author isn’t aware that the issues he faces are quite unusual and certainly out of keeping with the audience’s personal experience? Leading to the obvious next question, “if not…”.

Is it that the author knew that the issues he is having are not a typical upgrade experience and chooses to post and quite deliberately not admit that the issues are atypical for an upgrade of any kind, let alone from Lion to Mountain Lion? If so, one might again ask what the motivation might have been…

Well I have had wifi issues which are very annoying. At my home I have no issues where I use an airport extreme. At my office where we use a non apple router I cannot connect consistently and also my VPN keeps dropping out. Surely apple tested this OS on non apple hardware?

For being the resident tech’ writer you sure aren’t very tech saavy. Uncheck the auto brightness setting and disable iCal under login items under accounts. And as far as writership goes, this is pretty obtuse and objectified. The ENTIRE OS sucks because of three specific (user related) issues? Try reading an OSX for dummies book before you elect to claim yourself as a ‘tech writer’ because you obviously know nothing about OSX or Linux based processing. Any issues with chrome are self contained in chrome. DUH.